WADA’s mission to extract Moscow Laboratory data incomplete

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A five-person World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) expert team, spent a week in Russia on their mission to retrieve data from the Moscow Laboratory. The team however were unable to complete its mission within the prescribed time.

An issue raised by the Russian authorities maintained that the inspection team's equipment to be used for the data extraction had not been certified under Russian law.

The inspection team will now prepare a formal report which will be sent to the independent Compliance Review Committee (CRC). The CRC will meet on Jan 14-15 when Rusada's code compliance status will again be considered.

WADA had set a Dec. 31 deadline for RUSADA to meet the condition or once again be found non-compliant and could face even tougher sanctions laid out in the International Standard for Code Compliance by Signatories.

Russian athletes could again be on the outside looking in with another Olympics approaching in Tokyo in 2020.The opening up of the Moscow lab was supposed to be the end of the long-running doping scandal that began in 2015 and rocked the sporting world, preventing Russian athletes from competing in two Olympics and world championships.

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